A great resource for homestay, study, and travel in Japan
It’s hard to imagine how different living with a family from another culture (or even living with a different family within your own culture!) can be. A homestay student and the family s/he stays with can each have radically different views of the experience.
How to prepare for this? Check out http://www.athome.nealrc.org/
Okay, it’s a resource website that can feel a little, well, simple at first.
But as I went through it, I discovered I wasn’t always getting the right answers to the tests. So I clearly had some assumptions that would be interpreted differently in Japan.
The site includes some tutorials. These tutorials are well-paced, using a variety of methods–prose, animations, diagrams, interactive images. Very small tests come up every so often. There are 3 modules–
(1) The Cultural Child (and we are all cultural children, especially we Americans)
(2) What You Need To Grow, and
(3) Homestay Diaries–Growing Pains . . . and Gains.
Here’s a quick example of differing perceptions–
There’s also a *great* Links page (within the Resources topic)–12 links for everyday life in Japan and 10 links on study/daily living/travel.
At Home In Japan was created by Jane Bachnik and funded by Japan’s National Institute of Multimedia Education (NIME) in Makuhari, as well as by the Japanese Ministry of Education.
Enjoy the tutorial and other resources there–they are a free, easy, no-risk way to prepare yourself for enjoying life in Japan.
Thanks to the staff at Western Washington University, a KCP affiliate university, for this link.